NAME
criticism - Perl pragma to enforce coding standards and best-practices
SYNOPSIS
use criticism;
use criticism 'gentle';
use criticism 'stern';
use criticism 'harsh';
use criticism 'cruel';
use criticism 'brutal';
use criticism ( -profile => '/foo/bar/perlcriticrc' );
use criticism ( -severity => 3, -verbose => '%m at %f line %l' );
DESCRIPTION
This pragma enforces coding standards and promotes best-practices by
running your file through Perl::Critic before every execution. In a
production system, this usually isn't feasible because it adds a lot of
overhead at start-up. If you have a separate development environment,
you can effectively bypass the "criticism" pragma by not installing
Perl::Critic in the production environment. If Perl::Critic can't be
loaded, then "criticism" just fails silently.
Alternatively, the "perlcritic" command-line (which is distributed with
Perl::Critic) can be used to analyze your files on-demand and has some
additional configuration features. And Test::Perl::Critic provides a
nice interface for analyzing files during the build process.
If you'd like to try Perl::Critic without installing anything, there is
a web-service available at . The web-service does
not yet support all the configuration features that are available in the
native Perl::Critic API, but it should give you a good idea of what it
does. You can also invoke the perlcritic web-service from the command
line by doing an HTTP-post, such as one of these:
$> POST http://perlcritic.com/perl/critic.pl < MyModule.pm
$> lwp-request -m POST http://perlcritic.com/perl/critic.pl < MyModule.pm
$> wget -q -O - --post-file=MyModule.pm http://perlcritic.com/perl/critic.pl
Please note that the perlcritic web-service is still alpha code. The URL
and interface to the service are subject to change.
CONFIGURATION
If there is exactly one import argument, then it is taken to be a named
equivalent to one of the numeric severity levels supported by
Perl::Critic. For example, "use criticism 'gentle';" is equivalent to
setting the "-severity => 5", which reports only the most dangerous
violations. On the other hand, "use criticism 'brutal';" is like setting
the "-severity => 1", which reports every violation. If there are no
import arguments, then it defaults to 'gentle'.
If there is more than one import argument, then they will all be passed
directly into the Perl::Critic constructor. So you can use whatever
arguments are supported by Perl::Critic.
The "criticism" pragma will also obey whatever configurations you have
set in your .perlcriticrc file. In particular, setting the
"criticism-fatal" option to a true value will cause your program to
immediately "die" if any Perl::Critic violations are found. Otherwise,
violations are merely advisory. This option can be set in the global
section at the top of your .perlcriticrc file, like this:
# Top of your .perlcriticrc file...
criticism-fatal = 1
# per-policy configurations follow...
You can also pass "('-criticism-fatal' => 1)" as import arguments, just
like any other Perl::Critic argument. See "CONFIGURATION" in
Perl::Critic for details on the other configuration options.
DIAGNOSTICS
Usually, the "criticism" pragma fails silently if it cannot load
Perl::Critic. So by not installing Perl::Critic in your production
environment, you can leave the "criticism" pragma in your production
source code and it will still compile, but it won't be analyzed by
Perl::Critic each time it runs.
However, if you set the "DEBUG" environment variable to a true value or
run your program under the Perl debugger, you will get a warning when
"criticism" fails to load Perl::Critic.
NOTES
The "criticism" pragma applies to the entire file, so it is not affected
by scope or package boundaries and "use"-ing it multiple times will just
cause it to repeatedly process the same file. There isn't a reciprocal
"no criticism" pragma. However, Perl::Critic does support a
pseudo-pragma that directs it to overlook certain lines or blocks of
code. See "BENDING THE RULES" in Perl::Critic for more details.
AUTHOR
Jeffrey Ryan Thalhammer
COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 2006-2007 Jeffrey Ryan Thalhammer. All rights reserved.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself. The full text of this license can
be found in the LICENSE file included with this module.